News Digest for Oct. 12 - ArtWeLove News

Insights / Headlines

on October 9, 2009

A "Vogue" photograph by Irving Penn, who died last week at 92. ; Via Fingerlickin' Good

Share on the web

Praise and blame was the order of this week’s news, with indignation running high all over the art world—sometimes with good cause—and the announcement of an unusual number of major-league accolades and other marks of distinction. Read on for ArtWeLove’s news digest, now also available in email form—bringing a comprehensive roundup of the week’s art developments to your digital doorstep. If you aren’t signed up, click here. If you’d rather stick to reading it on ArtWeLove’s site, follow this link to unsubscribe. As always, we welcome your feedback at editorial@artwelove.com.

BARNES AND IGNOBLE, A SUSPECTED HEIST HOAX, & A SEXY MILKMAID AT THE MET

For years the planned move of the Barnes Foundation from suburban Philadelphia to the city’s center has been one of the most controversial museum projects anywhere, going explicitly against the wishes of the institution’s late founder—who insisted that his $2 billion collection of Impressionist and Modern masterpieces stay exactly where it was—in a transparent attempt to bring the city more tourism dollars. Now, in what seems like the final blow to Barnes’ impassioned defenders, a Philadelphia commission has unanimously approved of a design for the museum’s new proposed location, even though the “tortured” and “convoluted” plan is the “strongest argument yet for why the Barnes should not be moved in the first place," according to the New York Times’ Nicolai Ouroussoff.

In California, meanwhile, police are starting to show more than a little irritation over signs that the supposed theft of a multimillion-dollar art collection from a Pebble Beach house—touted last week as perhaps the second-biggest art crime in American history—was actually concocted, hilariously poorly, by the victims. Hints that the heist was a scam include an apparently faked forced entry, a suddenly materializing ransom note that police somehow overlooked in their investigation, and, most suspicious of all, a seeming inability by the collectors to prove that the artworks, said to be worth $80 million, actually existed.

A more genteel scandal emerged in New York at the Met, where Walter Liedtke, the curator of the current show dedicated to Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, said that he viewed the famously demure painting as a sexual allegory, with suggestive earthenware and other randy details—an appraisal surprising to other art historians. Sexing things up a bit might not be the worst idea for American institutions like the Met, though. Despite what seem to be common increases in museum attendance, an Art Newspaper survey found that a full third of U.S. museum directors have had to take pay cuts due to funding shortfalls in the recession.

GALLIC ART RAGE, A LOST LEONARDO, & A MAJOR MIDDLE EASTERN FAIR

The French art world had a particularly tumultuous week. Newly installed culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand—who has been castigated for his frank descriptions of enjoying sexual tourism in a book—has been called upon to resign by both the far-right National Front and the Socialist far left for his passionate defense of director Roman Polanski, recently arrested for the decades-old rape of a 13-year-old girl. The Louvre incurred the wrath of another two powerful opponents—French epicures, who denounced plans to open a McDonald’s in the museum’s underground passageway, and the Egyptian government, which far more seriously has cut ties with the Louvre over accusations that the museum knowingly purchased a set of stolen archaeological reliefs earlier this decade. UPDATE: The Louvre has announced it will repatriate the objects, and Egyptian authorities say they will resume dialogue with the museum upon their return.

Then Pierre Bergé, the collector who sold the works he and the late Yves Saint Laurent amassed at Christie’s in February, says he has received death threats over a controversial pair of Chinese bronzes that were looted from Beijing’s Summer Palace in 1860 and which he almost sold for millions at the auction before Chinese pressure killed the deal. Bergé says he still intends to sell the pieces, and will never return them to China. And if that wasn’t enough controversy for one country, Brit-art bad girl Tracey Emin has raised the possibility of moving to Provence to escape Britain’s new 50 percent tax on people earning over £150,000 a year. She’ll fit right in.

In other European news, a scientist in Florence appears to be on the verge of getting permission to test out a theory that he has held for three decades—that Renaissance artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari secretly preserved Leonardo da Vinci’s lost masterpiece The Battle of Anghiari behind a false wall when he was asked to paint over the famous battle scene with a mural glorifying the Medicis. Speaking of Medicis, billionaire Russian magnate, art collector, and friend-of-Putin Roman Abramovich made headlines when he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with a group of fellow adventure-seekers; his girlfriend, art patron and Pop magazine editor Daria Zhukova also made the news in a Guardian profile, the biggest revelation of which was the charming confession “I like baking. I'm a huge cookie and cupcakes and cakes girl."

On a much more serious note, the National Museum in Kabul to finally able to reopen this week thanks to Britain’s return of about 2,000 artifacts that had been smuggled out of Afghanistan during the war-torn years that followed the Taliban’s ouster of Soviet troops in the mid 1990s. Elsewhere in the Middle East, plans to create an art destination that people might actually dare visit seem to have succeeded in Abu Dhabi, which has announced that its first modern and contemporary art fair next month has lined up such blue-chip participants as Gagosian, PaceWildenstein, and White Cube—with Larry Gagosian, no foe of new revenue sources, even scheduled to appear in a panel discussion.

TURNER NOMINEES, ARTFUL PRESIDENTS, & THE PASSING OF A FAMED PHOTOGRAPHER

There were prizes and honors all around this week. Architect I.M. Pei was awarded the Royal Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects, Op-Art painter Bridget Riley won Germany’s Goslar Kaiser Ring prize, debt-ridden photographer Annie Leibovitz received the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s Woman of Distinction award, and Brooklyn artist Ran Ortner won the first $250,000 ArtPrize, an open-call and American Idol-style open-voting contemporary art award instituted in Grand Rapids, Michigan by a 27-year-old art fan with access to his parents’ money. President Obama, who won a little prize of his own, officially announced the new additions to the White House art collection, which though known for some time still managed to thrill due to the inclusion of such exciting artists as Glenn Ligon, Susan Rothenberg, Josef Albers, and Jasper Johns. Then, in what is not exactly an honor, the World Monuments Fund added Gaudi’s famous Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família in Barcelona and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin homes to its endangered sites list.

In always-exciting nominee news, contestants for the always-controversial Turner Prize have been announced in London. They are Enrico David, Lucy Skaer, Richard Wright, and Roger Hiorns, an installation artist who is so far the odds-on favorite to win, at least according to the bookies who deal in this stuff. The Guggenheim also announced the contenders for next year’s Hugo Boss Prize: Cao Fei, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Roman Ondak, Walid Raad, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Finally, the art world's week was weighted down by two deaths. Legendary Vogue fashion photographer Irving Penn, who was the longest-tenured photographer at Conde Nast and who perfected a forgotten and highly laborious printing technique using platinum, died at 92. Artist Susan Fiol, the founder of Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room, an experimental music space that gave free reign to musicians like Thurston Moore and Tom Verlaine, died at 49.

Related Articles:

"Architect Robert Venturi slams planned Barnes Foundation move" [via the Los Angeles Times]

"Art Commission approves new Barnes building" [via the Philadelphia Inquirer]

"Architects Reimagine the Barnes Collection" [via the New York Times]

“Art Heist Victims are Now Suspects in a Criminal Enterprise” [via KION]

"Vermeer's Naughty Milkmaid" [via the Daily Beast]

"Salary cuts for one third of US museum directors" [via the Art Newspaper]

"RIGHT AND LEFT, CALLS FOR MITTERAND RESIGNATION" [via artforum.com]

"'Bad taste' cries as McDonald's moves into 'Mona Lisa' museum" [via cnn.com]

"Egypt, Demanding Artifacts’ Return, Cuts Ties With the Louvre" [via the Associated Press]

"Egypt and Louvre Resolve Differences" [via the New York Times]

"PIERRE BERGÉ RECEIVED DEATH THREATS OVER CHINESE BRONZES" [via artforum.com]